Floating Staircase(10)

In the months following Kyle’s death, I grew sullen and withdrawn. At first there wasn’t anything special about my grief to separate me from Adam or my parents, and even if there had been, no one else in my family was in any frame of mind to notice. It wasn’t that my mother and father became more and more despondent or unavailable since Kyle’s death; it was simply that the both of them, always well-meaning and kind, could not regain the sense of energy and dedication that had defined them as parents prior to this horrible tragedy. There was something lost to them, and they knew not how to get it back.

The little duplex in Eastport closed in on itself like something dark and hibernating or like a corpse withdrawing into a grave. A troubled canyon had formed between the remaining members of the Glasgow family, the distance too great to fill by the time we became aware of its presence.

My mother, who’d been a generous and soulful woman with no further understanding of a life beyond matrimonial domestication than the generations before her, took up religion. She’d drag me to St. Nonnatus every Sunday where we’d sit in a pew that smelled of Pine-Sol and listen to the priest expatiate from the pulpit on the glory of God. This churchgoing lasted just over a year. If it did my mother any good, I couldn’t say. I know it didn’t do me any good, although I’m not quite sure if it was ever meant to. I took this to be some sort of penance for my role in Kyle’s death, but I never said anything about it to my mother.

My father, who’d always been an intimidating physical presence, seemed to grow smaller day by day, some vital bone or organ now broken within him. He reminded me more and more of those rusted old cars on concrete blocks, colorless weeds growing all around him. He became an alcoholic after Kyle’s death and maintained that ungodly and self-deprecating profession until prostate cancer punched his card many years later.

In those final years my memories of the man who had once been athletic, even-tempered, stern but compassionate, an overall good father and husband was even worse than the image of the old car on blocks. He was an indistinct and shapeless imitation of a man slouched in a recliner before the television set, a bottle of Dewar’s on the end table beside his chair, the medicated look of an asylum inmate on his face.

Adam became no more than a stranger to me—another neighborhood kid whom I did not know except to glance at with a sense of vague recognition on the school playground. A stranger whose bedroom was across the hall from mine.

For a short time, my dark, angry secrets were the baby birds I squeezed to death in the nest behind the shed and the ants I stuck to bits of Scotch tape, watching them squirm until they eventually stopped.

There was a small brown frog, too, which hopped out of a mud puddle in the street after a brutally unforgiving rainstorm brought down a number of trees, as well as a telephone line in our neighborhood. I caught the frog and carried him in cupped hands behind the shed in our backyard. I sat on a cord of firewood while the little thing trampolined inside my hands for what must have been hours.

By the time I opened my hands and released the frog, which bounded away through the underbrush, tears streaked my face. My reign of terror over the tiny creatures of my neighborhood was over . . . but left behind in its wake was the hollow ringing of culpability.

Ultimately I became a jumpy, twitchy mess who not only made myself nervous but troubled those around me. Everyone expected me to eventually fall on some jail time, which at different points in my life I probably deserved, but it never came to that. I was in what one therapist termed “the indefinite present,” some sort of constant flux. Ever changing, ever evolving. I thought of silkworms metamorphosing into moths and those fat, greasy pods that burped up phosphorescent green ooze in the movie Gremlins.

I feared Kyle’s vengeful return from the grave. On the eve of his first birthday following his death, I convinced myself he would come for me. Sleep was not to be found that night; I was too wired, sitting up in bed listening for the sounds of bare feet in the hallway and water dripping from his clothes. He would walk into my bedroom, his head smashed and broken, his skin a blasphemous blue green like the mold that grows on bread, and stare at me not with eyes but with black, soulless divots that leaked muddy water down his rotting face.

He’d point one accusatory finger at me as he stood in my doorway in a spreading puddle of dark water. You did this to me, he’d say. You did this to me, Travis. You were my older brother, and it was your job to protect me, but you killed me instead. And now I’m here to take you back with me, take you back beneath the water where you’ll sink into the ground and break apart like broken glass.

I thought, You did this to me. Because when you kill your brother, part of you dies with him.

I began to lock my bedroom door at night. No one cared and no one said anything. On the occasion when my old man would lumber out of bed and stagger drunkenly to the bathroom, my heart would catch in my throat, and a fine film of perspiration would break out across my flesh. I was certain it was Kyle coming for me. Then I would hear the toilet flush, and I’d know I was safe for the time being. But soon . . . soon . . .

My dreams came in a whooshing funnel of kaleidoscopic imagery—of ice-cold water as dark as infinite space; of being suspended indefinitely in the air, unable to fall yet afraid of falling; the dull whack of bone on some solid, invisible surface.

One recurring nightmare had me chased through a maze of slatted wood boards, my freedom glimpsed occasionally through the slats and knotholes in the wood but unreachable just the same. Finally, overcome by fatigue, I would collapse to the ground only to learn that the ground was not solid beneath my feet but instead a miasma of cloud-like steam and quicksand. I struggled but knew it was futile: I was slowly pulled down to my suffocating death, though not by the quicksand but by what felt like tiny hands around my ankles.